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Published for the first time in English, the debut novel of Marguerite Duras--renowned author of The Lover and The War--is the story of a family's moral reckoning and a daughter's fall from grace

Marguerite Duras rose to global stardom with her erotic masterpiece The Lover (L’Amant), which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt, has over a million copies in print in English, has been translated into forty-three languages, and was adapted into a canonical film in 1992. While almost all of Duras’s novels have been translated into English, her debut The Impudent Ones (Les Impudents) has been a glaring exception–until now. Fans of Duras will be thrilled to discover the germ of her bold, vital prose and signature blend of memoir and fiction in this intense and mournful story of the Taneran family, which introduces Duras’s classic themes of familial conflict, illicit romance, and scandal in the sleepy suburbs of Paris and the southwest provinces of France.

Duras's great gift was her ability to bring vivid and passionate life to characters with whom society may not have sympathized, but with whom readers certainly do. With storytelling that evokes in equal parts beauty and brutality, The Impudent Ones depicts the scalding effects of seduction and disrepute on the soul of a young French girl.

Including an essay on the story behind The Impudent Ones by Jean Vallier--biographer of the late Duras--which contextualizes the origins of Duras's debut novel, this one-of-a-kind publishing endeavor will delight established Duras fans and a new generation of readers alike.

Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) is the internationally known author of the Prix Goncourt–winning novel The Lover, as well as The War, The North China Lover, Moderato Cantabile, and the screenplays of Hiroshima mon amour, India Song, and other works. The New Press has published translations of her books The North China Lover, The War, Wartime Writings, and The Impudent Ones.

Kelsey Haskett was born in London, Ontario, Canada. She completed her M.A. and PhD in French Literature at Laval University, in Quebec City. In 1989, she was invited to develop the French Program at Trinity Western University (Langley, BC, Canada), where she also spearheaded the development of the Department of World Languages and Cultures. She then chaired the department (2003-2018) and was responsible, as well, for developing the major in World Languages and Cultures. She retired at the end of 2019, after 30 years of service to the university.

In 2011, she published a major study in French on family relationships in Marguerite Duras's novels, entitled Dans le miroir des mots (In the Mirror of her Words) (Summa Publications).  She is also the co-editor of a book with Holy Faith Nelson on French Women Authors: The Significance of the Spiritual (1400-2000) (University of Delaware Press, 2012). Haskett is a long-standing member of the Société Internationale Marguerite Duras, as well as the Association Marguerite Duras, situated in Duras, France, in the area where Duras’s first novel is set.

Michael Reynolds is the Editor in Chief at Europa Editions. He is the recipient of the 2016 Golden Colophon Award for Superlative Achievement & Leadership in Independent Literary Publishing, awarded by the Community of Literary and Magazine Presses, and a 2017 Epiphany Magazine Honoree for Publishing Excellence. He has served on the jury for the PEN/Heim Translation Fund, the Gutekunst Prize for Young Translators, and the foreign jury of the Strega Prize. He is a regular speaker at the Columbia School of Journalism’s Columbia Publishing Course, and at publishing and translation conferences in America and internationally. He is a member of the Rutgers University Press Advisory Council, a member of the Independent Publisher Caucus Steering Committee, and the founder of Bookselling Without Borders, a scholarship program that diversifies the culture of reading by building bridges between the American bookselling community and the international book industry.

Prize-winning and bestselling authors Reynolds has worked with at Europa include Alina Bronsky, Amelie Nothomb, Elena Ferrante, and Chantel Acevedo, among others.  Reynolds was born in Australia and now lives in New York.

Founded in 1992, The New Press is a not-for-profit book publisher with a public-interest mission. The New Press publishes books that explore issues that affect us all; its authors provide ideas and inspiration for the activists, teachers, policymakers, and everyday citizens who are working to defend and promote democracy. In its nearly thirty-year-history The New Press has published more than 1,000 books, including The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, the national bestseller that has changed the conversation about criminal justice and become a critical text of the Black Lives Matter movement. The New Press does its work with the help of its many supporters; please visit them at www.thenewpress.com or follow them on Facebook or Twitter to find out more.

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Marguerite Duras' "The Impudent Ones": An Evening with Kelsey L. Haskett and Michael Reynolds